What is Adobe Illustrator 8.x?

Illustrator 8 to me is a great solid version of illustrator.

Before this Illustrator had some issues that created problems. After this version they are just adding extra features and effects.

You can merge shapes. work in preview mode. manage color swatches. Work in layers. Paste in front. Paste in Back. Hide. with all the same key commands you use today.

If you want to use this with your sketches you will need to down load Adobe Streamline to outline a TIFF of your drawing. The path making is not as good as today, but it is servicable.

 

It allows you to create exact vector drawings and type in the PostScript language. It will create a PDF you can print on OS X in preview.

I have used Adobe software from Illustrator 3.2. up to CS6. The workflow I created in Illustrator 8 has remained unchanged to this day.

Thumbs UP

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What a difference a year makes! The June 1997 release of Illustrator 7 was so disappointing, it was like getting an ugly sweater as your only birthday gift Unfamiliar keystrokes, new color creation and storage, and new modifier keys frustrated so many longtime users that they put version 7 back on the shelf and kept using version 6. This year, the package is brimming with so many goodies that you’ll find new and exciting features months and months after opening the box. There hasn’t been a release this feature rich since Illustrator let you work in the preview mode. This is the upgrade Illustrator 7 should have been, and with this release Adobe has completely redefined vector illustration.

After years of offering the most primitive blending tool. Illustrator 8.0 moves ahead of the competition. Blends are “live,” which means you can change the color, shape, or position of any of the key objects in a blend, and all the intermediate steps update. Adobe has gone a step further than the competition by allowing compound path blends, making it easy to create 3D effects. Blends are no longer limited to straight lines, so they can twist and turn in all sorts of shapes. Also, you can use objects filled with gradients as blends to create metallic and reflective effects. Finally, Illustrator lets you blend among more than two objects at a time — just select them all and use either the Blend command or the Blend tool. Unfortunately, the Automatic Blend command sometimes causes distortions that the Manual Blend tool doesn’t. We hope Adobe will improve this feature in an update.

Someone at Adobe looked at the program Expression, took its concept of brushes, and brought these into Illustrator. So instead of the old, fake paintbrush, which simply created filled paths.
Illustrator 8.0 features four different types of brushes: Calligraphic, Scatter, Art, and Pattern. Calfigraphic brushes are closest to the old paintbrush. Instead of putting down a hard-to-edit filled path, these brushes are true strokes that you can easily modify You can redefine them to be thinner or thicker, with a new angle and roundness, and all the artwork updates automatically.

The Scatter brushes are akin to Painter’s “hose” feature. Scatter brushes let you define an object as a brush and then paint with the object as it scatters around the path. You can position Illustrator 8.0’s Scatter objects on or off the path and rotate and resize them. This means just one scatter brush, defined as a star, can fill a sky with a whole galaxy of different-size stars, some close together and some far away.

The Art brushes use existing objects to define the look of the brush. The Art brushes are most like Expression’s, and allow you to paint with strokes resembling natural media — a marker pen, a watercolor brush, a bristle brush, and so on. You can even turn any object, such as an arrow, into an Art brush, and then watch it curve and bend as the brush follows a path. The Pattern brushes replace Illustrator’s old Patterns on a Path. Pattern brushes make it very simple to create ropes, chains, and even railroad tracks that follow any path.

The Gradient Mesh is a new type of object that lets you blend colors together along a network of paths, rather than from object to object. With Gradient Mesh, you can create very subtle blends, contours, and shadows, resulting in artwork that looks more like a Photoshop airbrush. It takes a lot of manipulation of path nodes to position Gradient Mesh colors, and some common tools and techniques are not available when you work with Mesh objects. Ironically, most print artists used to working with vector programs may find it hard to create artwork using the Gradient Mesh. However, anyone who has worked with 3D modeling programs will instandy grasp the concept.

Illustrator 8.0 also offers some new drawing tools and updates the old ones. The new Pencil is far more responsive and much smoother than in the past. Even better, the Pencil not only draws paths, it lets you reshape them. This is a real benefit for all those who have never been able to think in terms of Bezier handles.

For those who need more feedback and information about what they are doing, Adobe has created an onscreen feature called Smart Guides. With Smart Guides enabled, little labels pop up to tell you what type of object you are about to snap to, what angle you are moving along, and what object you are about to select. Smart Guides also let you snap to any position on a path, not just an anchor point. Anyone working with Illustrator for technical drawing or layout will appreciate Smart Guides.

The Actions palette from Photoshop is a welcome addition to Illustrator 8.0. Actions let you record commands and play them back with a single click or keystroke. This makes it easier to invoke commands that don’t have keystrokes, such as Expand Blend or Add Anchor Points. You can easily store and play back the scale, rotation, and shear transformations you need to create 3D packaging, automating that laborious process. You can also combine commonly paired commands, such as Outline Path and Unite, into an Action you invoke with a single keystroke. Unfortunately, unlike Photoshop’s, the Actions in Illustrator 8.0 don’t allow batch processing. The next version of the program needs to add this feature.

The new links panel shows all the linked and embedded images in a document so you can find and update missing or modified images easily. Most important, links records any scaling or rotations you apply to the image and automatically applies them to updates or replacements. Unfortunately, the links palette doesn’t let you extract an embedded image, nor can you find the image’s color mode.

Adobe has also given Illustrator 8.0 a Navigator palette that works like the one in Photoshop. Some designers with very involved layouts will find the Navigator palette a real help. However, most designers who have mastered navigation modifier keys or have very simple documents won’t have much use for it. This palette can also slow down the program, as Navigator has to keep up with the current display. If you find Illustrator 8.0 slow, try hiding the Navigator panel.

With all these new features, Illustralor 8.0 is still missing some basics: no multiple pages, no object or type styles, primitive Web controls, and no colorization of gray-scale images. Illustrator 8.0’s Free Transform tool is no match for the Enveloping tool in CorelDraw. The Eyedropper and Paint Bucket tools are primitive compared to FreeHand’s Graphic Search and Replace. And of course, there are the transparency lenses in FreeHand and CorelDraw, something Adobe insists it will never include until “true” PostScript transparency is possible.
If you stayed with Illustrator 6 or 6.5, it’s time to move up to Illustrator 8.0.

Unfortunately, you’ll still have to deal with the steep learning curve for version 8.0’s new Swatches and Co ors panels, as well as adapt to the modifiers for the Pen. Even the brave folks who have been working with version 7 may spend some time trying to find commands that Adobe moved around. For instance, in Illustrator’s last three versions, the Pathfinder commands have been in three different places. One hopes Adobe will leave things in one place for a while.

Fortunately, Adobe has fixed many of the things that made Illustrator 7 unusable. For example, it put some of the important left-handed keyboard shortcuts back on the menus. And it added a None color to the Color panel, which makes it much easier to turn off the color in fills and strokes. Adobe even gave the Layers panel a command that restores the Thin layers from Illustrator 6.

Cohen, Sandee. (February 1999). Illustrator 8.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 50, 52-53).

Download Adobe Illustrator 8.x for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.1 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

Mac OS 7.1 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Note from @barteglobal : TESTED and Works with OS 9 on iMac G3 with 512 MB RAM

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver